Why Not Use a Digital Will?

The main problem with the custom-made digital will services or digital wills held with lawyers is that you need to keep them up-to-date. And personally, I know that’s a task that will pop up on my To-Do list every now and then, and I’ll postpone it for the eternal “later”, thinking I have all the time in the world to sort it out. Of course I don’t. There are services such as Legacy Locker, but for me they would suffer the same fate.

I don’t know when I’m going to die, but I know that because of this perfectly human postponing of tasks that don’t really seem that urgent, using a regular digital will solution will ensure that it’s of absolutely no value whatsoever when I do. Most services will be unusable for my digital executor because I never got around to updating it. What then is the solution? Well, something you use every day.

Using LastPass to Share Passwords

The ideal way to share access to your digital accounts is to use a service that will always be up-to-date. In my case that’s the LastPass service, as it has all the associated browser extensions and apps for my devices. Because it’s useful to me on a day-to-day basis, it will be up-to-date. This is a crucial point in my decision to use it. For you, it may be a different password manager, assuming you can share in the same way as LastPass.

With LastPass, it’s possible for all users to share passwords individually with any other LastPass user (with or without letting them see the password), and it’s also possible to share a whole folder of passwords with other LastPass users if you’re a premium user. This gives you some flexibility and plenty of options.

To share an individual password with someone using LastPass, go to your LastPass vault and search for the item. On the right-hand side, click on the people icon to share, then enter the email address of the recipient. You can check the box if you want them to be able to see the password, but I don’t recommend it.

How to Make This Work

If you trust your spouse with everything, one option would be to use LastPass to share access to all of your important accounts with them. But, if you only want to give them access after you die, here’s another option.

Create a new email account, the username and password of which are specifically to be kept for your executor to give your spouse or other family member upon your death. Then in LastPass share the account details for your legacy wishes with this email address (after creating a LastPass account using that email address). You could even email this new address with specific instructions from time to time, letting them know where to get photos from, which accounts have certain documents in them, etc.

Let your family know ahead of time that this will be happening so that they access the accounts and fulfill your wishes as soon as possible after your death. And then you’re set!

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Dirk Gielen

January 27, 2018 at 4:09 am

Thanks for the subject, especially interesting answer to my question I google'd to here, for securing legacy of my social media accounts content.
I think the social media companies are not faster aware of your death neither to take it off line so fast, thus I reason I just need to add it to my Will/testament document what is in obvious first top digital archive places/folders, like my digital career is archived professionally meeting unhackable protocols to military standards secure archive what is supporting my digital Humanitarian career projects Legacy if something happens to me investigating authorities sure check out such original source, and I got my Will printed regularly on paper at home, and on my computer and buffer/portable drives. I'm just thanks to your search here, add to my digital Will folder/document I give my beautyful social media accounts contents onto here by two National Banks in Europe, cause they are the good guys and I invented the ultimate unique exclusive almighty Divine Global Hum. Bank and fund etc, these are the real good guys and the only pro's I know who take professional goodness really serious and field work results generally.
Advice/tip: Do not just trust for instance your left political party or a museum or some other organizations as rooky/newbee, cause many of them so called good guys are actually goodguysless, and would fail to keep your Legacy alive and kicking as nice.
Real good guys can be a good country or part of a country where the people and governance for instance left or Artistic etc good for you(rs), as (online) Career/contribution-Legacy is to my opinion not good to hand over to family but rather to collegue expert equals or superiors. One's Will should be working out just fine before social media content would cease to be kept or accessible for official legal representing heritage authority figure/function. Thanks, my Will just finally also includes my Social media accounts worth to stay as I craft couple High culturally morally.
Will it is!

"If you trust your spouse with everything, one option would be to use LastPass to share access to all ... But, if you only want to give them access after you die here’s another option. Create a new email account, the username and password of which are specifically to be kept for your executor to give your spouse "

I am not sure that I understand the concept.
It basically is "you can trust your spouse with everything. If not, you can trust someone else with everything"?